Although co-creation of artefacts is a common practice in virtual exchange (VE), there are still few studies that explore the connection between collaboration on multimodal texts and student teachers' development of intercultural and pedagogical awareness. Based on a trinational VE, coincidentally developed during the outbreak of the pandemic in…

In the context of Virtual Exchange (VE) it is often assumed that participants will be naturally prepared to interact online successfully with their international partners. However, there is ample evidence in the literature to suggest that VE participants are usually unaware of effective communicative strategies in synchronous and asynchronous…

Universities worldwide transitioned to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a digital revolution in higher education. The aim of this study is to give a unique insider's perspective of how students experienced the shift to online learning within a Qualitative Methods course at the beginning of the pandemic. Our data is…

Technological and societal developments have increasingly led to higher education programs and courses being offered online as distance education. This can mean an opportunity to study regardless of time and place and thereby combining work, family life, and studies. However, online distance studies also introduce problems at the societal,…

"English as a lingua franca (ELF)" is a well-known concept for English used as an international contact language among people from diverse linguacultural backgrounds. Using a questionnaire, we explored the attitudes of Spanish and Swedish pre-service primary school teachers towards English and its users after their collaboration on a…

Taking a practice perspective, this article explores how built spaces within the university can impact on, and enable, practices of everyday professional learning amongst university educators. The discussion draws on analysis, informed by the theory of practice architectures, of interviews with six academics at a Swedish university. Three main…

This study aims to examine the difference in students' satisfaction with the Quality Characteristics (QualChar) of the Digital Learning Systems (DLs) with regards to gender and frequency of interaction between students-students and students-teachers. A cross-sectional online quantitative survey was used to collect data from English language…

The increasing prevalence of online courses has highlighted the importance of digital literacy for students. This study investigates the relationship between digital literacy and academic achievement among students who participate in an online course on anatomy and physiology. The study also evaluates how different aspects of digital literacy,…

Integration is vital to student well-being in higher education but integrating new students from different countries can be challenging. To ascertain students' integration into their new environment, this mixed method study combined the data collected from weekly diary entries of home and international students at the start of one engineering…

Facebook is growing fast in various fields including education field. Most studies showed that today students in higher education use Facebook to communicate, cooperating and finding solutions. The main purpose of this study is to investigate and reflect on students' perspectives regarding the use of Facebook and its influence on students'…

This paper compares outcomes of student teachers' use of oral classroom and written online forum discussions of course literature, with the aim of examining how each mode facilitates reflective practice. Data were collected from a class of 11 participating student teachers. Oral discussions were video-recorded and written online discussions were…

This paper reports on a study investigating the use of digital devices by language students at universities in New Zealand, Sweden and Germany. The study also examines the use of social media for learning a foreign language in an institutional context, using survey results from language students in the three countries. Based on an online survey…

This paper presents the outcomes of a short intercultural exchange project involving pre-service English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher training establishments in Sweden and Israel. The project comprised three online meetings recorded in "Zoom" in which student teachers gave feedback on each other's project assignments involving…

It is a human fundamental to desire to be valued, loved and respected--to be significant. Social exclusion induce significance loss which elicits a 'quest for significance'--the search for opportunities to re-gain significance. The present article establishes this relation in a laboratory experiment (N = 71, mean age = 28, SD = 10.42, 65% women,…

This article shares qualitative analysis of online discussion threads between student teachers in seven countries. The student teachers engaged together online to share intercultural perspectives and experiences on a range of topics of relevance to education systems, policy, teacher education, and childhood. In 2017, participating countries were:…